I waited more than an hour a day or so ago, called in, had an agent go through the exercise of "manually repricing" an itinerary with 9 segments. Still wouldn't ticket. He called his support desk and they said "try tomorrow - needs a manual override". Tried releasing it again, no go, he called support desk again, got a different person who said the same thing, "try tomorrow - needs an override". He then noticed that the charged price and the calculated price were off by a couple dollars. He changed the price again manually, resubmitted, and it ticketed within 30 seconds.

Hard to say. There are different things at play as well. There's the ticket, then there's the receipt generation and email that has to follow.

If you're ticketing a CO ticket on an OAL, it usually takes a few minutes to ticket, then a few more minutes after that to get the receipt generated. Once it's been ticketed, you can usually get the ticket number off the OAL's site faster than waiting for CO to display it or email it to you, so clearly CO has some sort of capacity issue.

One could almost think they have wait-states embedded in the process in order to make sure everything has propagated throughout the system, before continuing and mayhap relying on that propagated state.

It might also be as simple/silly/dumb as double checking everything went through (better safe then sorry), not as fast, but maybe an extra safeguard against stuff getting out of sync (which happens in all airline backends and GDS's).

In todays world, instant whatever, isn't necessarily good, despite the me me me culture of todays youngsters. Google a bit for how banks perform some of their bigger transactions, they seem instant, but the back-ends can take hours to sync, allowing them all kinds of ways of screwing stuff up (or preventing your money from leaving the country ;D)...

My money's (OK, a dutch chocolate bar ;D) on the CO backend being a bit more batch oriented; and like most large complex and business critical systems, it's always very costly and extremely risky to overhaul such a production system and changing the way it works... I think this is about more then just money and pride...

Plus, shouldn't we (both CO+UA) be rejoicing that this most likely also means no-StarNet blocking ? :D

This has nothing to do with StarNet blocking. They can block or not block regardless of whatever system they use.

Have we seen any specific cues that this is the case?